Previous Visitors to the Gender Institute

Sara Ahmed

Sara Ahmed is Professor of Race and Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths, University of London. Previously based in Women's Studies at Lancaster, her research is concerned with how bodies and worlds take shape; and how power is secured and challenged in everyday life worlds, as well as institutional cultures. Her publications include: Differences that Matter: Feminist Theory and Postmodernism (1998); Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Postcoloniality (2000); The Cultural Politics of Emotion (2004), Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (2006) and The Promise of Happiness (2010).

In February 2011, Sara gave a public lecture co-hosted by the Gender Institute and the Department of Media and Communications. For more information on this lecture, please click here|.

Dr Nkoli Aniekwu

Nkoli Aniekwu was a Visiting Fellow for MIchaelmas Term 2010. She teaches Legal Method and Research at the Department of Public Law, University of Benin, Benin City, Nigeria. Her book Legal Methodology and Research in Nigeria was described by Professor Susanne Karstedt of the School of Law, University of Leeds as "a classic text in empirical and legal research methods."

Nkoli Aniekwu is a member of the Management Board of the Centre for Gender Studies and former Head, Department of Public Law, Faculty of Law, University of Benin.

Elena Beltran

Elena Beltran was a Senior Visiting Fellow at the Gender Institute for Michaelmas Term 2012. She is member of the Department of Public Law and Legal Philosophy at the Universidad Autonoma de Madrid. She was member of the board of directors of the Department of Public Law and Legal Philosophy and of the Law School. Now, she is member of the board of directors of the Women Studies Institute and she is the Chair of the Committee of Equality in the Universidad Autonoma de Madrid. She was Visiting Scholar at the Human Rights Direction in the Council of Europe, in Strasbourg; at New York University School of Law (1989 and 1998); at Boston College; and at the Institut de Theorie du Droit, Paris X.

She has written on issues of contemporary theories of justice; liberalism and its critics; critical legal studies; feminist jurisprudence; constitutional building of sexual equality; gender and citizenship; education; gender and multicultural challenges to liberal democratic institutions; the meaning of respect for religious and non-religious; prostitution and women rights. She is currently working on property rights and human bodies, especially women bodies.

Rachel Berger

Rachel Berger is Associate Professor of History at and Fellow of the Simone de Beauvoir Institute at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada. She is, by training, a historian of medicine and the body in South Asia, and has worked on the history of Ayurvedic medicine in the context of late colonial biopolitics, Hindi-language discussions of gyneacology and reproductive medicine in interwar India, and the visual culture of consumption in the subcontinent. Her current South Asia-based research project takes up the history of food and nutrition in interwar and early post-colonial India, focusing on the emergence of new food economies, a shift to preventative medicine and the evolution of consumption in North India. A second project explores the concept of intimacy as it is deployed in Indian vernacular representations of sexuality and the body, focusing particularly on recovering the subject from its abstraction into the greater work of nation-building. Rachel has long-standing scholarly and activist interests in queer lives (in theory and practice), reproductive politics, and questions of power in relation to the formalization of political and activist practices. As such, she is excited to use the opportunity of being in feminist community at the LSE to begin new research on evolving discourses of 'choice', especially with regards to questions of reproduction and coupling set against the backdrop of homonationalism and neoliberal economic life.

Lauren Berlant

Lauren Berlant is George M. Pullman Professor of English and Director of the Lesbian and Gay Studies Project at the University of Chicago. She is author of The Anatomy of National Fantasy: Hawthorne, Utopia, and Everyday Life (1991), The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship(1997), and The Female Complaint: the Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture (2008). She has also edited a number of volumes, including Intimacy (2000) and Compassion: The Culture and Politics of an Emotion (2004). This talk comes from her forthcoming book, Cruel Optimism.

In February 2009 Lauren gave a public lecture at the Gender Institute entitled After the Good Life, the Impasse: Human Resources, Time Out, and the Precarious Present. Click here| to listen to the lecture.

Wendy Brown

Wendy Brown is Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley. Her fields of interest include the history of political theory, nineteenth and twentieth century Continental theory, critical theory, and cultural theory (including feminist theory, critical race theory, and postcolonial theory). Her current work focuses on the relationship of political sovereignty to global capital and other transnational forces, including those associated with religion, law, culture and moral discourse.

Professor Brown's books include Manhood and Politics: A Feminist Reading in Political Theory (Rowman and Littlefield, 1988), States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity (Princeton, 1995), Politics Out of History (Princeton, 2001), Left Legalism/Left Critique, co-edited with Janet Halley (Duke, 2002), Edgework: Critical Essays in Knowledge and Politics (Princeton, 2005), and Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire (Princeton, 2006).

In November 2008 Wendy gave a public lecture Gender Institute entitled Desiring Walls. Click here| to listen to the lecture.

Dr Anne-Marie Fortier

Anne-Marie Fortier is a Reader in Social and Cultural Studies in the Sociology Department at Lancaster University and was a Visiting Fellow at the Gender Institute for Lent and Summer Term 2011. Engaging with critical race studies, feminist, queer and postcolonial theories, her work attends to how communities of belonging and entitlement are configured. Her work has centred on émigré cultures, queer diasporas, multiculturalist nationalism (and multicultural intimacies), and affective citizenship. Her current research interests are twofold: the citizenship naturalisation process in Britain, and the use of genetic genealogies to formulate and stabilise ideas of collective identities. She is the author of Migrant Belongings (2000), Multicultural Horizons (2008), co-editor of Uprootings/Regroundings (2003), and author of several journal articles.

In March 2011, Anne-Marie gave a research seminar| here at the Gender Institute.

Dr Edeltraud Hanappi-Egger

Edeltraud Hanappi-Egger was a Visiting Fellow at the Gender Institute for Lent and Summer Term 2011. She holds a master's degree in Computer Science and a PhD in Technical Sciences from the University of Technology Vienna. She was research scholar at several international research institutions. Since 2002 she is full professor for "gender and diversity in organizations" at WU Vienna and published more than 200 articles on gender and technology, diversity management and organization studies. Her work was rewarded several times.

Edeltraud Hanappi-Egger was the head of the senate at WU from 2006-2009. She is a member of the university board of the Technical University of Graz and since 2008 she is a member of the "Young Academy" of the Austrian Academy of Sciences.

Paul Higate

Paul Higate is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Politics at the University of Bristol. He has recently been made a Fellow of the ESRC/AHRC Global Uncertainties Programme and for the next 3 years will be carrying out a project under the title: Mercenary Masculinities Imagine Security: The Case of the Private Military Security Contractor'.

In March 2010 Paul gave a research seminar here at the Gender Institute entitled Vodka from the 'Butt Crack': Homoeroticism, Militarised Masculinities and the Private Militarised Security Company.

Dr Sari Irni

Sari Irni visited LSE in February 2014 as Erasmus teacher exchange scholar and plans a longer research visit in the near future. Sari finished her doctoral thesis Ageing Apparatuses at Work: Transdisciplinary Negotiations of Sex, Age and Materiality (Åbo Akademi University Press) in Women's Studies in 2010. She works as a University Lecturer in Gender Studies at University of Tampere, Finland. She works currently on the Academy of Finland financed postdoctoral project “Performative Hormones – Affective and Medical Assignments of Sex”. Her current research interests include feminist theory, affective interdisciplinary encounters, science studies, queer theory, and the political history of sex hormones. She has published in Finnish, Swedish and English. Her publications in English include the co-edited book Complying with Colonialism: Gender Race and Ethnicity in the Nordic Region (Ashgate) and articles in the journals Gender, Work and Organization, NORA – Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research, and European Journal of Women’s Studies.

During her longer visit at the Gender Institute Sari will be working on affect in transgender persons’ narratives of hormone treatment as well as on affective tensions in research processes, both in the scholar’s encounters with her research material and in textual encounters between scholars.

Dr Delia Jarrett-Macauley

Delia Jarrett-Macauley completed a PhD in English Literature at the University of Kent where she also taught on the MA in Women’s Studies from 1989‐1995. She devised and managed the Arts Management programme at Birkbeck College, London, and has also taught at Goldsmiths College, on the PGCE. A biographer and a novelist, Delia’s interests span Classical and postcolonial literature, the visual and performing arts of the African diaspora and cultural politics. She has presented programmes on BBC Radio 3 and 4, given papers at several conferences and contributed to journals such as Gender and History and Feminist Review. Her first novel, Moses, Citizen and Me, won the Orwell Prize for political writing in 2005. Delia is also an experienced consultant and trainer with knowledge of public and private sectors, managing change, diversity and management development.

Ratna Kapur

Ratna Kapur is Director of the Centre for Feminist Legal Research in New Delhi, and lectures at the Indian Society for International Law. She is also on the Faculty of the Geneva School of Diplomacy and International Relations. She practiced law for a number of years in New Delhi, and now teaches and publishes extensively on international law, human rights, feminist legal theory and postcolonial theory. Her publications include: Feminist Terrains in Legal Domains: Interdisciplinary Essays on Women and Law (1996), Subversive Sites: Feminist Engagements with Law (1996), and Secularism's Last Sigh?: Hinduvata and the (Mis)Rule of Law (1999).

In March 2009 Ratna gave a public lecture at the Gender Institute entitled Hecklers to Power? The Waning Tools of LIberal Rights and Challenges to Feminism in South Asia. Click here| to listen to the lecture.

Ranjana Khanna

Ranjana Khanna is Margaret Taylor Smith Director of Women's Studies and Professor in the Department of English, The Program in Literature, and Women's Studies at Duke University. She is the author of Dark Continents: Psychoanalysis and Colonialism (Duke University Press, 2003) and Algeria Cuts: Women and Representation 1830 to the Present (Stanford University Press, 2008). She has published widely in journals like diacritics, differences, positions, SAQ, Screen, Signs, and Art History. She is currently at work on projects about the concept of asylum and on technologies of unbelonging.

In December 2010, Ranjana gave a public lecture series at the Gender Instiutte entitled Asylum and Unbelonging. Abstract and audio recording for the lecture can be found here|.

Professor Anne Kovalainen

Anne Kovalainen was Visiting Fellow at the Gender Institute in Michaelmas Terms 2011. She is Academy Professor nominated by the Academy of Finland, and Professor at the School of Economics, University of Turku, Finland. She has served as Vice-Chair and member of the Research Council for Culture and Society at the Academy of Finland, and member of the Standing Committee for Social Sciences at the European Science Foundation.

Academy Professor Kovalainen is an economic sociologist by education and her research interests range from gender, economy and social theories to methodological questions. Her recent books include Europeanization, Care and Gender (Palgrave 2011, forthcoming) and Qualitative Methods for Business Research (Sage 2008). For her fellowship, Academy Professor Kovalainen will mainly work on two topics: gender and economy, and epistemic communities and gender.

Dr Mia Liinason

Mia Liinason was an Academic Fellow at the Gender Institute. She is a Senior Lecturer in Gender Studies at the Department of Cultural Sciences, Göteborg University (Sweden) and visited the Gender Institute until November 30, 2014. Mia has a PhD in gender studies from Lund University (Sweden) and is currently working on two research projects: The first is an ethnographic study about contemporary feminist activism in Sweden (funded by the Swedish Research Council 2012-2015) and the second project is a comparative study about institutionalized women’s organizations in Denmark, Norway and Sweden (funded by Lund University 2012-2014). Mia is also a teacher and supervisor in gender studies, and teach at all levels on courses about feminist theory and methodology.

Amina Mama

Amina Mama is currently at Mills College from 2008, California for three years as the first Barbara Lee Distinguished Chair in Women's Leadership. Prior to this appointment she spent almost a decade as the first Chair in Gender Studies at the African Gender Institute, University of Cape Town, South Africa, where she lectured, initiated the transdisciplinary graduate programme in Gender Studies, and carried out a series of regional intellectual capacity development and publication projects in the field of gender studies. Notable among these are continental networking and capacity development initiative 'Strengthening Gender Studies for Africa's Transformation', which supports the growing feminist scholarly network and hosts the Gender and Women's Studies in Africa website. She is a founding editor of the first continental academic gender studies journal 'Feminist Africa', established in 2002.

In the last decade she has carried out several collaborative research projects in the area of gender and politics, sexuality and higher education. These include Mapping African Sexualities (in collaboration with Takyiwaa Manuh, University of Ghana and supported by Ford Foundation) and Gender and Institutional Culture in African Universities (in collaboration with Teresa Barnes, University of the Western Cape, supported by the Association of African Universities). She is currently developing new work on the gender politics of militarism, conflict and peace-building and transnational feminism.

In September 2009 Amina gave a public lecture at the LSE co-presented by the Gender Institute, STICERD and the Department of International Relations entitled Militarism and Underdevelopment. Click here| to listen to the lecture.

Dr Sam McBean

Dr Sam McBean was a Visiting Fellow at the Gender Institute for 2013-14. Her research is broadly interested in queer and feminist media, literary, and cultural theories and questions of temporality. Her PhD research, which is currently in preparation as a monograph, built on critiques of feminism’s time as singular, progressive, and generational and aimed to, in dialogue with queer temporality theory, explore alternative models in 20th and 21st century feminist genres. Her current project takes a queer feminist approach to new media and digital sites (such as Facebook, YouTube, tumblr, GIFs), focusing in particular on the affective temporalities of these media forms.

She has contributed teaching to the MSc Gender, Media and Culture degree at the LSE and in the past has held Visiting Lectureships at Birkbeck, the University of Westminster, and Oxford Brookes. She has work published and forthcoming in the edited collections Beyond Citizenship?: Feminism and the Transformation of Belonging and A Handbook of Feminist Theory and the journals Feminist Review, Camera Obscura, Feminist Theory, Journal of Lesbian Studies, and Sexualities.

During her time at the Gender Institute, Sam worked on a project preliminarily titled (Re)Mediation and Affect: New Media Feminisms and Digital Queers. This project brings her interests in queer and feminist temporalities to new media and digital sites (such as Facebook, YouTube, tumblr, and GIFs) to explore how the temporalities of new media and digital forms remediate feminist and queer communities, histories, intimacies, and affects.

Dr Lindah Mhando

Dr Lindah Mhando (PhD) was a Visiting Associate Professor of African & African America Studies and Women Studies & Research Associate – Center for Study of Race, Gender Ethnicity and Gender in the Social Sciences at Duke University. Her teachings and research interests focused on the interplay between three interrelated areas: Gender, cultural studies and Inequality.

Minoo Moallem

Minoo Moallem is Professor and Chair of Gender & Women's Studies at UC Berkeley. She received her Ph.D. in Sociology from University of Montreal and completed her postdoctoral studies at University of California Berkeley. She is the author of Between Warrior Brother and Veiled Sister: Islamic Fundamentalism and the Cultural Politics of Patriarchy in Iran (UC Press). She is also the co-editor (with Caren Kaplan and Norma Alarcon) of Between Woman and Nation. Nationalisms, Transnational Feminisms and The State (Duke University Press, 1999), and the guest editor of a special issue of Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East on "Iranian Immigrants, Exiles and Refugees." She has recently ventured in digital media. Her on line project "Nation-on-the Move"(design by Eric Loyer) was recently published in Vectors. Journal of Culture and Technology in a Dynamic Vernacular (Special issue on Difference, Fall 2007). Professor Moallem's areas of research include women in modern and contemporary Iran, transnational approaches to Muslims, fundamentalisms, and feminism. Her current work on immigrants, exiles and refugees from Iran focuses on the question of belonging and citizenship for Muslim women in the contemporary west as well as in Iran. Much of this work is interested in transnational conceptions of citizenship and global neoliberal forms of governmentality. She is currently working on a book manuscript on the commodification of the nation through consumptive production and circulation of such commodity as the Persian carpet and a project on Iran-Iraq war movies and masculinity.

Minoo gave a public lecture at the LSE co-hosted by the Gender Institute and the SOAS Centre for Gender Studies entitled Gender, Race, and Religion in the Spectacle of Citizenship.

Jennifer Nedelsky

Jennifer Nedelsky is Professor of Law at the University of Toronto. Her teaching and scholarship have been concentrated on Feminist Theory, Theories of Judgment, American Constitutional History and Interpretation, and Comparative Constitutionalism. In addition to her book, Private Property and the Limits of American Constitutionalism (1990), she has published numerous articles in these areas. She is currently is at work on two books Law, Autonomy and the Relational Self: A Feminist Revisioning of the Foundations of Law and Human Rights and Judgment: A Relational Approach to be published by Oxford University Press.

In November 2008 Jennifer gave a research seminar at the Gender Institute entitled Rights and the Fully Human Self.

Dr Ilya Parkins

Dr. Ilya Parkins is a Visiting Fellow in the Gender Institute for Michaelmas, Lent, and Summer Terms, 2013-14. She is an Assistant Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of British Columbia’s Okanagan Campus. Ilya is a specialist in contemporary feminist cultural theories, early twentieth-century Western cultural formations, and fashion studies. She is the author of Poiret, Dior and Schiaparelli: Fashion, Femininity and Modernity, and co-editor, with Lily Sheehan, of Cultures of Femininity in Modern Fashion. Ilya’s research has appeared in such periodicals as Australian Feminist Studies, Time and Society, Topia, Women’s Studies, and Biography.

During her tenure at the Gender Institute, Ilya worked on a project entitled A Cultural Politics of Unknowable Femininity, 1910-39, which foregrounds a transnational analysis of images of women as unknowable across several domains of feminized mass culture. The project is funded by a four-year Insight grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC).

Dr Seppo Poutanen

Seppo Poutanen was Visiting Fellow at the Gender Institute in Michaelmas Term 2011. He is Academy of Finland Senior Researcher and Adjunct Professor of sociology at the University of Turku, Finland. He holds a Licentiate Degree in philosophy and Ph.D. in sociology, both from the University of Turku, and he mainly works in the areas of philosophy of science, social theory and social studies of science. Dr. Poutanen has published a textbook on moral philosophy in Finnish, and articles on social epistemology, critical medical sociology, social theory and social studies of science in Social Epistemology, Critical Public Health, Journal of Critical Realism and Sociological Research Online. For his fellowship, Dr Poutanen will focus mainly on the relationship between Whiteheadian process philosophy, methodology of social sciences and gender.

Professor Shirin M. Rai

Shirin M. Rai will be a Visiting Professor at the Gender Institute from Lent Term 2012. She studied at the University of Delhi (India) and Cambridge University (UK) and joined the University of Warwick in 1989. She is Professor in the department of Politics and International Studies. She has directed a four year Leverhulme Trust funded programme on Gendered Ceremony and Ritual in Parliament (2007-2011). Her research interests lie in the area of feminist politics, gender and political institutions, globalisation and development studies. She has written extensively on issues of gender, governance and development in journals such as Signs, Hypatia, New Political Economy, International Feminist Journal of Politics and Political Studies. She is the author of Gender and the Political Economy of Development: from Nationalism to Globalisation (2002). Her latest works are Feminists Theorize the International Political Economy, Special Issue of Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society (co-ed. With Kate Bedford); The Gender Politics of Development (2008, Zed Books/Zubaan Publishers), (co-ed) Global Governance: Feminist Perspectives (2008, Palgrave) and (ed.) Ceremony and Ritual in Parliament (2010). She is the co-editor (with Wyn Grant) of the Manchester University Press book series Perspectives on Democratic Practice.

Professor Susan Rudy

Susan Rudy was a Senior Visiting Fellow at the Gender Institute for Lent Term 2012.

She is a Professor in the Department of English, University of Calgary, Alberta, Canada and has served as President of the Executive of several learned societies in North America, including the Canadian Literature Discussion Group of the Modern Languages Association (2008-09) and the Canadian Association of Chairs of English (2007-08). In 2009, she was Visiting Professor, School of American and Canadian Studies, University of Nottingham and, in 2002, Visiting Scholar at the Institute for Gender, Sexuality and Feminist Studies, McGill University, Montreal, Canada.

Professor Rudy is a literary critic and feminist theorist. Her research interests are in poetry, feminist theory and gender studies, and the history of women's writing in English. Recent publications include "Why Postmodernism Now? Toward a Poetry of Enactment" (a chapter in Re: Reading the Postmodern: Canadian Literature and Criticism after Modernism [Ottawa 2010]) and, with Ryan Fitzpatrick, "`These marked spaces lie beneath / the alphabet': Readers, Citizens, and Borders in Erín Moure's Recent Work" (Canadian Literature forthcoming 2012). Her books include Writing in our Time: Radical Poetries in English Canada (Wilfrid Laurier University Press 2005) and Poets Talk (University of Alberta Press 2005). During her fellowship at the Institute, she will focus on her current book project, Poetries of Enactment: The Work of Erín Moure and Caroline Bergvall, which draws on gender and spatial theory to think about the socially-engaged writing practices of contemporary innovative women writers.

Dr Sunera Thobani

Dr. Sunera Thobani was a Visiting Fellow at the Gender Institute for Michaelmas Term 2013.

Dr. Sunera Thobani is Associate Professor at the Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice at the University of British Columbia, Canada. Her scholarship focuses on critical race, postcolonial and feminist theory; globalization, citizenship and migration; and Muslim women, the War on Terror and media. She has authored Exalted Subjects: Studies in the Making of Race and Nation in Canada (University of Toronto Press, 2007) and she has co-edited (with Dr. Tineke Hellwig) Asian Women: Interconnections (Canadian Scholars’ Press, 2005) and (with Dr. Sherene Razack and Dr. Malinda Smith) States of Race: Critical Race Feminist Theory for the 21st Century (Between the Lines, 2010). Her research has also been published in Feminist Theory, Borderlands, Race & Class, Canadian Journal of Women and the Law, Supreme Court Law Review, Meridians, and Sikh Formations, among other peer-reviewed journals.

Robyn Wiegman

Robyn Wiegman is Professor of Women's Studies and Literature and former Director of the Women's Studies Program at Duke from 2001-2007. Her publications include American Anatomies: Theorizing Race and Gender (1995), Who Can Speak: Identity and Critical Authority (1995), Feminism Beside Itself (1995), AIDS and the National Body (1997), The Futures of American Studies (2002), and Women's Studies on Its Own (2002). Professor Wiegman's research interests include feminist theory, queer theory, American Studies, critical race theory, and film and media studies. She is currently working on two manuscripts: Being in Time With Feminism focuses on the institutionalization of feminism in the U.S. academy; Object Lessons: The U.S. Knowledge Politics of Identity pays attention to relations of identification and affect in the constitution of identity as an academic object of study.

In November 2009 Robyn gave a public lecture at the Gender Institute entitled Learning How to Cite Judith Butler. Click here to listen| to the seminar.

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